Emails reveal college officials knew they were overbilling state

“When they asked me how to do it, I said that’s not how to do it,” said Randall, who now is retired. “I really don’t even recall … the history of the thing. I do know that I didn’t feel comfortable.”

Browning, who is now president of Ohlone College in Fremont, declined to comment because she said she had no detailed memory of the issue. She did not review the emails and said the audit agency had not contacted her.

Loera also declined to comment. Neither Gibson nor Ramirez responded to requests for comment, and Isaac referred questions to college spokeswoman Pam Hunter.

Hunter said college President Joel Kinnamon is doing an internal review based on the audit's findings.

As early as June 2005, Roa and Matthew Breindel, then the coordinator of the college’s institutional research department, told Loera, Isaac and outside attendance consultant John Mullen in emails that the enrollment accounting seemed to be wrong.

In an August 2005 email, Isaac told then-President Maria Sheehan and then-Vice President of Administrative Services Jerry Patton that the new software system, Datatel, originally had been set up correctly to use actual hours but was manually overridden to use incorrect catalog hours. She said this was done under the direction of Randall’s March 8 email.

Randall disputed that characterization in an interview.

"The email I sent to them was not a direction," he said. "It was just saying that’s how they did it in L.A."

Later in August 2005, Isaac told Patton that consultant Mullen had done a sample test to determine the extent of the problem with attendance accounting and found enrollment figures were overstated by 1 percent.

In March 2006, even though Mullen knew the enrollment figures were not accurate, he gave Loera estimates for 2005-06, describing them in an email as “good enough for government work.” Loera forwarded the email to Patton, who submitted them to the chancellor’s office.

The following month, emails show Patton still was mulling over what to do about the overstated figures. In an April 27, 2006, email, Mullen told Isaac that he would “continue the analysis” so that “Jerry and others can set our course on that item for this and subsequent years.”

The corrections still hadn’t been made nearly three years later, in January 2009, when Patton – who had since been promoted to college president – sent an email to Loera stating that Loera's planned meeting with Mullen would be the perfect time to correct “the Datatel problem of over-reporting (full-time equivalent students).”

Still, the problem did not get fixed. In June 2009, Patton sent an email to Ramirez, along with Vice President of Business Affairs Edwin Deas and Vice President of Academic Affairs Farley Herzek, in which he acknowledged that the enrollment counts had an error rate between 2 and 4 percent. He asked for an analysis showing the fiscal impact of correcting the problem.

In July 2009, Patton told Deas, Herzek, Loera and Ramirez that the correction would not be made on the current enrollment report because doing so would cause auditors to question why the counts had changed from preliminary numbers submitted earlier. Patton said the college would instead submit accurate numbers after the end of the fiscal year.